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Neural mechanisms of an auditory temporal discrimination by the goldfish

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Summary

  1. 1.

    The capacities of the goldfish (Carassius auratus) auditory system for encoding and processing periodic temporal patterns were characterized using behavioral and neurophysiological analyses. Animals were classically conditioned to detect changes in the rates (20 to 200 Hz) at which tonal and noise signals were amplitude-modulated, at a variety of modulation depths (3 to 100%). For the same stimulus set, the variability with which saccular neurons represent envelope periodicity in inter-spike-intervals was measured.

  2. 2.

    The just discriminable change in envelope period (ΔP) is approximately equal to the variance wich spikes in saccular neurons are phase-locked to modulation envelopes.

  3. 3.

    The error made in detecting changes in modulation rate is highly correlated with the error with which inter-spike-intervals in saccular fibers represent envelope periodicity at a wide variety of modulation rates and depths. This is evidence that the goldfish estimates the duration of acoustic inter-pulse-intervals through information contained in neural inter-spike-intervals.

  4. 4.

    Factors in addition to synchronization error determine envelope period discriminability for amplitude modulated signals. Chief among these may be an informational signal-to-noise ratio, or the number of inter-spike-intervals (ISI) which bear information about envelope period as a proportion of the total ISIs evoked by a given stimulus.

  5. 5.

    There is a clear correspondence between the neural and psychophysical measures of envelope representation in the goldfish auditory system, and the precision with which damselfish recognize vocalizations of their own species on the basis of the time interval between repeated sound pulses.

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Abbreviations

CS :

conditioned stimulus

IBI :

interburst interval

ips :

impulses/s

ISI :

interspike interval

SAM :

sinusoidal amplitude modulation

Sd :

standard deviation

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Parmly Hearing Institute and Department of Psychology, Loyola University of Chicago, 6525 N. Sheridan Rd, 60626, Chicago, Illinois, USA

    Richard R. Fay

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  1. Richard R. Fay
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Fay, R.R. Neural mechanisms of an auditory temporal discrimination by the goldfish. J. Comp. Physiol. 147, 201–216 (1982). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00609845

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